PlzGivHugs

This seems really promising. Unfortunately, I expect they’ll still use Steam DRM, but everything I’ve heard so far is immensely promising so who know, maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll skip even that.

It is worth noting that unlike something like a League or Overwatch skin, and even a lot of early TF2 trading, modern CS and Dota skins have more emphasis put on their marketability and speculative value. For example, I’ve bought a few CS skins that I don’t use, purely because I expect their value to increase over the next couple years. Of course, thats not all of the buyers, but that influences the purchase, and allows for those valuations unlike a Fortnite skin with a fixed price tag set by Epic with zero recoupable value.

Just a few days ago, I wrote a comment about how you would theoretically try and become a significant competitor to Steam, and one of the points I raised was that Steam’s storefront and recommendations are very generous (compared to others). It makes a huge difference that even indie games can appear on the front page regularly, both improving user and dev experiences. Players find games that they enjoy, while devs pay a very small amount to get effective, targetted advertisements.

What do you mean still? So far as I can tell, its not even available for pre-order yet. Its purely closed beta for media.

Personally, Im more of a creative-mode player at the moment so the majority of the problems don’t affect me. Its also been a couple months since I last tried Minetest (mostly on Mineclone). From what I remember, my personal dealbreakers were:

• IMO much uglier graphics, and more significantly, its harder to graphically customize with mods and resource packs. Maybe its more versitile than I’m giving it credit for, but at the very least, its not used as there aren’t enough modders and artists making content for the game to even remotely compete.

• Performance - Minecraft may not be optimized, but I was getting much worse performance on Minetest. In particular, I was getting massive frame drops any time I placed or broke a block, making it extremely nauseating to play.

• UX - There were a ton of small roadblocks to actually playing the game as I wanted to. First, customizing the graphics settings - the menu was disorganized and defaults were really weird for my hardware. Then, I had to find and edit the permissions file to be able to fly and sprint on my creative world. Even after that, if I remember right, the controls or flight movement were limitted or weird but in a way that couldn’t easily be fixed.

• Lack of world editting commands - Im sure theres mods for this one, but its more work to find, figure out, and set up and by the time I got to this point, having to put in even more work just to make the game comparable was a dealbreaker.

Minetest isn’t really a substitute for Minecraft. Yes, its similar, but its far less polished, lacking in content, vanilla and otherwise, and is missing a lot of the technical functionality that makes much of Minecraft’s content (esspecially on the modding side) possible. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it, and I’ve debated trying to contibute to it myself (although my skills are very lackluster) but as it stands its only really a substitute in the context of things like casually playing Pocket Edition.

I woundn’t say this is suprising news. Most of the big companies and triple-a studios have been in a race to the bottom in recent years, and these are the main companies marketing and selling to console and mobile users. PC on the other hand, has always been less ruled by the big players and thus hasn’t been as impacted.

Yeah. Pretty much boils down to, “There is fewer good triple A games coming out, and less significant hardware advancements.” This doesn’t mean its getting worse, just means its getting better slower. Even if you read it as “getting worse as compared to other platforms” it doesn’t really work seeing as all these issues affect other platforms just as much, and often more.

I just used those two because I figured they’d want iconic D&D monsters, whereas Vecna, esspecially after taking away the godhood and magic elements, is just a fairly generic undead skeleton.

This is such a weird IP to pick, and an even weirder choice of killer. It feels really weird to cram a lich-turned-god into the same gameplay mechanics as a slasher movie killer, esspecially over many more iconic, recognizable, and unique character/monster designs.

I’m not a D&D fan in the slightest, but I would have thought something like a Mindflayer or some sort of lesser beholder would be more fitting, more inconic to D&D and more distinct from the other DBD killers.

Minecraft with mods?

Base game probably doesn’t have the level of detail you want, but with mods for either specalized detail blocks, or something more generic like Chisel and Bits or Carpenter Blocks, it should be close to make something close to what you want pretty easily.

Tldr: We know about the hacks and are working on it.

The changes to unit and god powers worries me a bit. Hopefully there’ll be some way to change those back to the old system for those who perfer it. The old system, IMO, was a really interesting approach to unit micro that was great for newbies and still had a lot of depth.

Thanks for the update.

Looking forward to the new update.

Its the same engine and does reuse a bunch of sprites. All done with permission, obviously.

Video is very too the point so I’d recommend watching it, but…

Tl;dw: Epic very optimisticly sells a 10th the amount of Steam, and offer effectively no discoverability. Most indie devs will get sales in the double digits and playercounts in ths single digits.

Well, give me an example then. I acknowledge I don’t play many RPGs, so maybe I am missing something obvious, but I have seen almost no innovation in big RPGs esspecially when it comes to integrating it with gameplay. All the examples that come to mind are more at the edge of what is considered part of the genre, like Mount and Blade, or RDR2.

My point wasn’t that it was well made. It was that Bethesda is at least trying to update and expand their tech far beyond what they’ve been willing to commit to in the past. Compare the difference between their older games vs Fallout 76 vs Starfield. A lot more is clearly re-written and updated rather than just tacked on unlike their previous “updates”. The widespread use of procedural level generation, for example - something that wouldn’t have been possible before regardless of the amount of duct tape. To my knowledge, no one else is currently putting that much effort into trying new mechanics and tech in RPGs, and certainly not with a triple A budget. I guess you have something like Mount and Blade: Bannerlord, which is using their tech improvements to significantly increase scale and complexity of their battles, but thats a very different type of game, and I can’t think of anything else that is using newer tech to add to gameplay.

More just that Bethesda is the biggest maker of Triple A RPGs and they’re finally updating the creation engine in a significant way. That said, to my knowledge, its still one of the more technically advanced RPGs (even if it doesn’t do much with that tech) and could hopefully at least work as a proof of concept to more ambitious developers.

While there are a ton of articles like this, most of which are low-effort, click-bait garbage, this at least makes a more compelling case by limitting it to RPGs. Maybe I’m just uninformed since I don’t generally like RPGs, but it seems like there have been a lot more quality RPGs released this year (esspecially in the “double A” budget class), and the two triple A releases both actually felt like a notable step forward (BG3 in design and content, Starfield in tech).